Control problems in building energy retrofit and maintenance planning

This paper presents a series of control problems in prioritizing building energy retrofit and maintenance plans through a review of recent studies. The building energy retrofits can be strategically performed on policy level, management level, system level and unit level. Based on existing research efforts, this study casts the optimal building maintenance planning problem into a general control system framework. Unlike traditional control applications, this study argues that the control system framework is also applicable to the building energy management level, which will significantly improve the sustainability of realized energy savings and cost-effectiveness of building energy retrofits. In a general control framework, a number of research problems in the control systems are formulated, namely 1) control system decay dynamics modeling; 2) control system inputs and model uncertainties; 3) control system outputs; 4) control system uncertainties and disturbances; 5) control system algorithms; and 6) grouping and modeling. The proposed control problems bring out the intrinsic relationship of reliability engineering, maintenance engineering and control engineering in the broad directions of energy efficiency and optimization. Investigations into the proposed control problems will contribute to further improvements in the building energy retrofit and maintenance plans than the currently prevailing engineering practice.